여성, 잡지, 전후 미국: 실비아 플라스의 『 벨 자』와 미디어 읽기

Abstract

Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar has garnered critical attention as a quintessential American female bildungsroman especially in association with the author’s autobiographical account of her coming of age struggle. The novel goes far beyond being Plath’s personal narrative as it extensively explores the American culture of the 1950s that defined and circulated the notion of femininity prescribed by Postwar America. Considering the various forms of mass media that operate to construct society’s views on women as well as women’s view of themselves, this paper focuses on the functions of print media embedded in the world of Esther Greenwood, the novel’s protagonist. Women’s magazines are an obvious communication medium through which the principles of femininity are conveyed, and Esther’s experience as a guest intern for a New York magazine both fascinates and disillusions her in the midst of a consumer society that promotes picture-perfect and mannequin-esque portraits of women. Using the media as a mirror, Esther recognizes her desire, guilt, anxiety and the repressive mold of postwar society. Her curious relationship with the print media of magazines, newspapers, tabloids, and advertisements, functions to delineate her self-portrait as she tries to understand herself. Though she never encounters a convincing, definitive picture of herself, Esther persists as an oppositional gaze in conflict with the dictates of the omnipresent media. In relation with the author Plath’s struggle with a mass media that drew on her public images and continues to mythologize her life, the objective of this paper is to analyze The Bell Jar as a social commentary on 1950s mass media and Esther as a complicating and complicated subject in search of herself in the labyrinth of glossy images.